Gearbox is probably happy overall about the Borderlands 4 launch, which quickly broke series records for concurrent players active on the Steam platform and did it again this weekend, topping 304K players sixteen hours ago. However, it also has to deal with performance complaints for the PC version, which have been voiced loudly in over 16 thousand and a half Steam reviews, which are currently 'Mixed' (67% rating).
Gearbox Software co-founder and president Randy Pitchford tried to address the performance in a lengthy X thread, alleging that there are some '4K stubborn' PC players who either don't have the hardware to run the game at Ultra HD resolution and should switch to 1440P, or perhaps do not want to use upscalers like NVIDIA DLSS even if they have access to them.
I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4K with ultra max settings and using 2-3 year old hardware. You do you, but Borderlands 4 and UE5 are doing a lot, and for me, that trade-off for frames isn’t worth it. I play at 1440p with settings super high and am super happy with that trade-off - the game looks amazing at 1440p. If you’re not 4K stubborn and just want to have a great, fun time with higher perf, please consider running at 1440p resolution. If you’ve got a beast of a video card, you’re probably fine at 4K. But if you’re in the middle or close to min spec, I would definitely recommend making that trade.
If you have a DLSS option, use it! Especially if you’re trying to run at resolutions higher than 1080p. This is a campaign game - you’re not competing in high-stakes esports here. The input latency is so insanely negligible that less than .01% of the population could reliably detect it without tools in a blind test. Take the W on frame rate and use this incredible tech with DLSS on.
Indeed, many comments that can be read not only on Steam but also on Reddit, X, and other social channels are from users who insist on using native rendering only. As seen in Wccftech's benchmarks, even the most powerful graphics card available on the market, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090, stops at around 48 frames per second with maxed settings and 4K native resolution. But games are not designed anymore to be running at native resolution, and to be honest, they haven't been for a long time on either PC or consoles. Besides, with the latest NVIDIA DLSS transformer model and AMD FSR 4 (which can be enabled at a driver level by 9000 series users), the visual quality is excellent and the performance gains are massive.
The Gearbox executive eventually answered one such comment that invited the studio to make their game 'look good without AI upscale'. As usual, Pitchford did not mince words:
Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know.
While there is an argument to be made that Borderlands 4 perhaps doesn't look as good as it should for how taxing it is on hardware, and Gearbox absolutely has work to do to improve performance through patches, deliberately choosing to keep AI upscaling disabled when both current hardware and software are designed with that in mind feels like living in the past.
In other Borderlands 4 news, the studio confirmed there is no spyware in the game. The first PC mods have already been uploaded to Nexus, and we've listed a few useful ones in this article.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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